Site Mobile Navigation

What Do Spoilers Spoil?

Over 10 percent of the comments on my “Hunger Games” column brought up the question of spoiler alerts. “Haven’t you heard of a spoiler alert?”, one exasperated reader asked. Another reader, Jim, reported that he was “trying rapidly to withdraw my forward of the article to my wife who’s in the midst of the 2nd book.” He didn’t want his wife’s experience spoiled as it would be, he assumed, if she knew how things turned out.

A recent study indicates that Jim’s assumption may be incorrect. In August 2011 two researchers at the University of California at San Diego reported (in the journal Psychological Science) that in a controlled experiment, “subjects significantly preferred spoiled over unspoiled stories in the case of both … ironic twist stories and … mysteries.” In fact, it seems “that giving away … surprises makes readers like stories better “perhaps because of the “pleasurable tension caused by the disparity in knowledge between the omniscient reader and the character.”

The suggestion is that there is a trade-off in the pleasures available to first-time readers or viewers on the one hand, and “repeaters” (as they are called in the scholarly literature) on the other. First-time readers or viewers, because they don’t know what’s going to happen, have access to the pleasures of suspense — going down the wrong path, guessing at the identity of the killer, wondering about the fate of the hero. Repeaters who do know what is going to happen cannot experience those pleasures, but they can recognize significances they missed the first time around, see ironies that emerge only in hindsight and savor the skill with which a plot is constructed. If suspense is taken away by certainty, certainty offers other compensations, and those compensations, rather than being undermined by a spoiler, require one.
The positive case for spoilers is even stronger if you are persuaded by those who argue, in the face of common sense, that suspense survives certainty. This is called “the paradox of suspense” and it is explained by A. R. Duckworth: “1. Suspense requires uncertainty. 2. Knowledge of the outcome of a narrative, scene or situation precludes any uncertainty. 3. [Yet] we feel suspense in response to fictions we know the outcomes of” (“The Paradox of Suspense II—The Problem,” The Journal of Film, Art and Aesthetics, Jan. 14, 2012).

How can this be so? How can a reader or viewer feel suspense in relation to an outcome he knows in advance? It seems counterintuitive, but there are many who insist that they have had that experience even after the 4th or 10th or 40th viewing of “Titanic,” “Psycho” or “The Sixth Sense.”

Scholars have come up with three ways of either de-paradoxing the paradox or denying it. Robert J. Yanal argues that repeaters mis-describe their own emotions; they might feel apprehension or fear in relation to a foreknown event, but they mistakenly report it as suspense: “apprehensiveness is not suspense, though the two often occur together” (“The Paradox of Suspense,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 1996). In short, there is no paradox of suspense.

Noёl Carroll believes there is a paradox and argues for a version of Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” (Biographia Literaria). (The analogy is mine, not Carroll’s.) Just as readers who enter into a compact of faith with an author are able to suspend — hold in abeyance — their knowledge that the features of a narrative (flying dragons, magic rings) are implausible, so can readers suspend their knowledge of how a story will turn out. Suspense can be imaginatively entertained (and experienced) even if, strictly speaking, there is none. Certainty can be overridden by an act of the readerly will. (See Carroll, “The Paradox of Suspense,” in Beyond Aesthetics, 2001.)

Richard J. Gerrig offers still another account of the matter. He notes that while viewing replays of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, he found himself “watching the first few seconds of lift-off and crying out mentally, “Make it!” (“Is There a Paradox of Suspense? A Reply to Yanal,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 1997). He poses the obvious question: “Why root — strenuously — for something that I know is not going to happen?” His answer is to posit a distinction between the knowledge one has in the abstract — if you are asked, did the space shuttle Challenger explode, you will unhesitatingly answer “yes” — and the knowledge available to one’s consciousness while processing the representation of a complex, multilayered event.

Gerrig’s idea is that not everything you know is in the forefront of your mind when you are attending to the arduous task of reading or viewing an aesthetic object: “Readers have knowledge of the outcome, but this knowledge does not automatically intrude on their moment-to-moment experience of the narrative.” Of course repeaters “can pull themselves out of the narrative world” in order “to have deliberate access to a [foreknown] outcome,” but “they must expend special effort,” and the more demanding the moment-to-moment experience the less they will be inclined to expend it. “Anomalous suspense is … about the failure of veridical expectancies to automatically penetrate into consciousness in the unfolding of a narrative.”

In his pastoral elegy “Lycidas,” written on the occasion of the death-by-drowning of a fellow poet, John Milton at once illustrates and theorizes Gerrig’s thesis. The reader and the first-person voice know from the outset that Lycidas’s body has not been recovered from the Irish Sea, but halfway through the poem, the poet imagines Nature strewing flowers on the “laureate hearse.” There is of course no hearse, but so detailed and lengthy is the catalog of flowers (the naming of them goes on for 20 lines) that the unavailability of anything for them to cover is itself covered over by the verbal profusion.

Having thus distracted both himself and the reader from what they certainly know but would prefer to forget, Milton steps back and reflects on the effect he has achieved: “For so to interpose a little ease, / Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.” The false surmise — that there is a coffin for the flowers to bedeck — is powerful enough to crowd out the reality to which the speaker now returns with a rueful “Aye me!” In Gerrig’s terms, Milton has pulled us “out of the narrative world” he has created; he has made the “special effort” necessary to break his own spell.

I am persuaded by Gerrig’s account of the “paradox of suspense” if only because it confirms the experience I have had many times of immersing myself completely in the uncertainties of a narrative whose conclusion I know, but may not actively know at the moment. But whichever account of the paradox you accept, the supposedly deleterious effect of a spoiler is diminished. Either spoilers give back more than they take away or they take away nothing because suspense and surprise survive them.

The exception is “works which deliver to the reader or viewer suspense and only suspense” (Yanal). The interest of such works is exhausted when the cat has been let out of the bag and there may not be much point to re-experiencing them. Perhaps Jim, the poster who tried to keep his wife from reading my column, regards “The Hunger Games” in that way and thinks that if his wife knows about the ending, the books have little else to offer her. If that is his view, the desire for a spoiler alert makes sense because what is spoiled is the only value the reading experience can provide. Many posters, however, would dispute that judgment and maintain that the trilogy affords multiple pleasures and insights.

In either case, the spoiler doesn’t amount to much and alerting readers to it is not a high obligation. If “The Hunger Games” is so shallow that it can be spoiled by a plot revelation, the alert doesn’t save much. If “The Hunger Games” is a serious accomplishment, no plot revelation can spoil it.

What's Next

Stanley Fish is a professor of humanities and law at Florida International University, in Miami. In the Fall of 2012, he will be Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. He has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Duke University and the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author of 15 books, most recently “Versions of Antihumanism: Milton and Others”; “How to Write a Sentence”; “Save the World On Your Own Time”; and “The Fugitive in Flight,” a study of the 1960s TV drama. “Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution” will be published in 2014.